ISLAMABAD, 15 July 2007 — A suicide car bomber killed 24 Pakistani paramilitary soldiers and wounded 28 yesterday in an attack that might have been linked to an army assault on a mosque in the capital, a military spokesman said.
The attacker rammed his car into a paramilitary convoy in the North Waziristan region on the Afghan border, 20 km (12 miles) southeast of its main town of Miranshah.
It was the second attack on security forces in northwestern Pakistan yesterday. Two security officials were wounded in an earlier blast near the town of Bannu in North West Frontier Province.
The attacks followed the storming of a mosque in Islamabad on Tuesday in which 75 supporters of hard-line clerics, most of them militant gunmen, were killed.
“We can’t say for sure but it could be a reaction to that,” military spokesman Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad said of the North Waziristan blast when asked if it might be linked to the mosque assault.
Meanwhile, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, head of the six-party Islamic alliance the Muttaheda Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) said he would resign from Parliament to protest the army raid on the mosque.
Qazi said he was also protesting the ongoing army build-up in tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
“I have decided to resign from the National Assembly in protest against the raid on the Red Mosque and the army actions in North West Frontier Province,” he told an Islamabad news conference.
“I will tender my resignation whenever the assembly is in session,” said Qazi, who also leads the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami opposition party.
“This is my individual decision and not a collective decision of the Muttaheda Majlis-e-Amal.”
Nearly 50 people have been killed in bomb attacks targeting troops and police in the northwest since July 3, when security forces in Islamabad surrounded the Red Mosque complex, following clashes with gunmen based there.
At least one wanted militant, speaking before commandos stormed the mosque, had threatened to launch revenge attacks if the mosque was assaulted.
Many of the militants who turned the mosque-school complex into a virtual fortress, and many of the religious students who studied there, were believed to have been from the northwest.
It was the most serious attack on Pakistani security forces since November when a suicide bomber killed 42 army recruits on a training ground in the northwestern town of Dargai.
In a separate incident yesterday, authorities in the northwestern city of Peshawar discovered two anti-tank mines hooked up to a timer in a car abandoned on a main city street.
They were safely dismantled.
Last Sunday, three Chinese workers were shot dead in Peshawar in an attack police said appeared to be linked to the Red Mosque.
Protesters angry about the assault on the mosque have ransacked offices and looted supplies of Western aid agencies in different parts of North West Frontier Province.
The government has sent extra troops to at least four different parts of the province, a provincial official said.
The army said 75 people had been killed in the assault on the Red Mosque-religious school complex.
Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Sherpao said on Friday 60-65 of the dead were militants and four or five of them were foreigners, but he did not say from where.
North Waziristan is a hotbed of Al-Qaeda and Taleban support, from where Taleban launch raids into Afghanistan, US military officers in Afghanistan say.
